HTC One Tips and Tricks

Instead of the simple swipe gesture to unlock your phone, you can set a custom one which can be extremely difficult for a thief to guess.

From your homescreen, go to Menu – Settings – Lock screen. Then chose Screen lock and choose Pattern.

It is also a good idea to untick Use visible pattern. Then if someone is watching over your shoulder while you entering your pattern, it will be harder for them to remember the pattern.

If you have forgotten your unlock pattern, then after 5 unsuccessful tries a button will appear saying ‘Forgot pattern’. Press this and you will be asked to enter your Gmail username/password. The phone will then ask for a new unlock pattern. If you don’t have a Gmail account, then you will have to either call your carrier or factory reset your phone.

Jelly Bean has an interesting new feature called Talkback which is designed for blind and low vision users.

The feature is an interesting way to navigate your phone however.

Simply go to Settings – Accessibility – Talkback to activate it. Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

When entering text into Apps such as your Messaging App, Facebook App and so on, you can tap on the words to start selecting text. Normally, you would then drag the left and right sliders to select the word, or words you want to highlight.

If you double tap on a word however, it will quickly select that word. Very handy for quickly copying and one words, name or place.

It is best to avoid task killers such as Advanced Task Killer. Android is designed to automatically pre-load certain applications, even if you don’t load them yourself. If it starts to run low on memory, it will smartly unload the oldest running apps automatically.

Manually killing tasks will only mean they get loaded in memory again. Task killers can make the phone slow, laggy, or drain battery life more quickly.

If you want to check how much RAM you have available, go to Settings – Application Manager. Then swipe from right to left so you see the Running Apps. At the bottom it should say how much is used and how much is free.

Normally when Apps are installed, an icon is automatically placed on your homescreens.

This can be annoying for users who want to keep their homescreens clutter-free.

To stop then, go to Google Play – Menu Key – Settings. Then untick Auto-add Widgets.

To set your voicemail number which allows your phone to automatically input your voicemail password, then open your Dialler App.

Then press the Menu key and choose Call settings. Then scroll down to Voicemail settings and set a Voicemail number (you might need to check with your carrier for the correct number).

Depending on your carrier you may have to enter the series of steps required to go through the voicemail menu, for example: *86,,yourpassword# (a comma inserts a pause).

If you tend to run out of battery power quickly, then you can turn on power saving mode.

Pull down the notification screen by swiping your finger from the top of the phone. Then select Power Saving.

To change the settings, go to the Homescreen – Settings – Power saving mode. Then press on that option.

Face Unlock allows you to unlock your phone by holding it up to your face. It is highly recommended to use the Improve Face Unlock feature to make the recognition faster and more accurate.

First, ensure you have Face Unlock enabled. Menu – Settings – Lock screen. Then chose Screen lock Face Unlock.

Once that is done go to Menu – Settings – Lock screen – Improve facial recognition. You might have to do this a few times to improve the speed of recognition. It is also a good idea to position the phone at different angles to your head to improve the accuracy.

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – Display – Brightness. Then choose the desired brightness setting. You can also select Automatic brightness to let the phone decide for you.